Greece to Make €459M Payment on Thursday

Greece is due to make a €459m (£332m) loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund on Thursday, with anxiety mounting about the heavily indebted country’s ability to service its debts.

According to a report this morning, the IMF lodged a demand for payment at the Bank of Greece on Wednesday, as the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, arrived in Moscow on a two-day charm offensive.

It would be “impossible for Greece not to service its debts this month,” an unnamed source told the AFP news service in Athens.

The IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, said on Sunday that the Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, had pledged to make the payment on time at a meeting in Washington. His comments came after Greece’s interior minister, Dimitris Mardas, suggested last week Athens would prioritise wages and pensions over the IMF payment.

Even though Greece managed to raise €1.1bn from the sale of six-month bonds on Wednesday, it remains in a precarious position – shut out of international debt markets and dependent on short-term bonds for borrowing.

Independent City analyst Louise Cooper said: “This [bond sale] indicates that right at the moment, Greece is not expected to default. Although who bought that debt remains unknown (Greek banks are reportedly under pressure from ECB not to buy any more Greek government debt), we do know it has some cash to repay the IMF and so does the troika know that.”

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Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency
trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.

MarketPulse is a forex, commodities, and global indices analysis news site providing timely and accurate information on major economic trends, technical analysis, and worldwide events that impact different asset classes and investors.

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